688 - Writing Jokes with Mike Birbiglia
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Wow. Okay. So my name is Craig Mazin. And you're listening to episode 6888 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things better.

That are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back a seven-time guest. He is a comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster whose new special, The Good Life, debuted this week on Netflix. It is the legendary Mike Birbiglia. Welcome back. Hey, guys. This is my favorite podcast. I, on the flight here, listened to the Taffy Ackner Moneyball episode. As a fan of the show, I request...

More breaking apart a movie. Oh, yeah. Did you die this year? Oh, my gosh. You don't do it. I think he's right. Yeah. I think he's right. We don't do it enough. But I guess what we do do enough or maybe too much of is having Mike Birbigli on the show. Seven-time host. We should give you the jacket, the robe that SNLers get. The seven-timers club. The seven-timers club. So here are the episodes he was on. So first was in 2013 for My Girlfriend's Boyfriend's Screenwriter. Wow. So way back in your first film. Then...

Austin Forever in 2014. So that was an Austin live show, which I'd forgotten that we actually, so that's where we sort of first. My girlfriend's boyfriend special. And then what was it? We talk about Sleepwalk with me in the movie? Because my girlfriend's boyfriend wasn't in the movie. It was number two. Yeah. Okay. That was a special, wasn't it?

That was a special. That was a special, great. So I guess we didn't, I think I first saw you, Joss Whedon interviewed you at the Dwight R. Skill Theater for Sleepwalk With Me. Sleepwalk With Me, 2012. 2014, Austin Forever. 2016, Don't Think Twice, your movie which we all loved. Thanks. Which is actually, it was so early on the dissection of how comedy groups work and how improv works and all that stuff. It's held up really well. Oh, thanks. Yeah. We had you on in 2019 for the new one. Yeah. We had you in 2020. You were part of a big episode with

what we're all up to during the pandemic. So we checked in to do there. And I was a guest on your show, which we also aired on this very podcast, your show called working it out. Your podcast is phenomenal. So I'm recommending it. Even I have, I have seen it and that's the thing. That's why I like the idea of maybe putting us on video because I like watching you. Oh, wow. More than I like listening to you. It's fascinating. I actually turned the sound off.

Oh, you turned the sound off. Yeah. Yeah, I just watched your mouth. I'm like a silent film podcast star to you. I blow it up and I just look at your mouth.

Yeah. Sexy Craig likes your podcast. Oh, I'm so glad that we're recording this. So recently on your podcast, you had Gary Simons who works with you on that podcast. Yes, true. And he's also a stand-up comic and you were talking through the process and it was so good in terms of answering questions about what it's like to get a career started as a stand-up comic. Yeah.

in the way that I think we're trying to answer those questions for aspiring screenwriters. It was just so, so smart. Thanks a lot. It's funny, there were two episodes back-to-back that were script notes-esque, but in the comedy space. The Gary Simons episode, which we basically speak to like, what do you do in the first three to five years of trying to be a comic? And then the week before, Ira Glass comes on and decides...

hey, I want to try to do stand-up comedy. I was impressed by this. I really was. So it was like, well, what happens if you're not a stand-up comic, you want to try it. I performed 10 minutes. What is your critique of these 10 minutes? And it's not unlike the three-page challenge. Right. So what I'd like to do...

with you on the podcast today is talk about how you write a joke for the stage, for a sketch, or for a scene. So we have some scenarios. It's sort of like how would this be a movie, but how would this be a joke? And we have some scenarios we're going to talk through and figure out what is the comedic premise for each of these types of writing and how different they are. A joke you tell on stage versus a sketch versus a scene, they're really different needs, even though they are all potentially different.

finding comedy in a situation. That's great. Cool. We're also going to answer listener questions on breaking a story, using an idea, TV remakes, and in our bonus segment for premium members, let's talk about video and social and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and stuff because you and your team do an amazing job with video for your podcast, the marketing without making it feel like marketing. You must have email lists that are managed. So I'd just love to know what all that's like because it's just

Because we want to beat you. Sure. Teach us your ways so that we may overcome you. So I just want to know more about that. That seems great. I love that. Cool. Drew, we have some news. We do.

We realized that Spotify had comments on the podcast episodes. Oh. No idea. So we turned them off. Oh, we have yours too. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So the Spotify comments we were getting on ScriptFans episode and the reason we turned them off, they're all about The Last of Us, Craig. Oh my gosh. And I'm sure the people that take time to leave comments on Spotify love the show and all the decisions we've made. Very measured feedback. Yeah. But.

But Mike, yours are still on. So you may not realize this. So we have a sampling of some of the comments on your Ira Glass episode. Amazing. So Rory wrote in and said, maybe the best episode of the show feels like the core of what this podcast should be about. Oh, wow. Yeah. String of Numbers says, props to Ira for being open and vulnerable in his work. It was interesting to see Mike pointing out where the punchline should go and Ira being less sure how to approach that. Yeah. All right. Ali says,

love this show, but quote, hiking is walking is a joke made on Sex and the City by a character played by David Duchovny 20 years ago. It's not original. Fair. And then we also looked at the YouTube clip for that and it said, you don't know this, but in my brain, you're my dad. Me or Ira? Yeah, to you. All right. Yeah. You wanted it to be Ira, didn't you? He is in some ways, I said this on the episode, he in some ways feels like my dad. He's a very...

paternal he is yeah yeah he gives that vibe yeah but I think there's a lot of dad energy in this podcast right now I mean we're all very sort of internet dad even you even you Joe yeah he's a young dad young dad he's a young child oh you're a young child I don't okay perfect

Because he seems so ambivalent about it? Yeah, exactly. I know I have five kids, but I don't know if I'm real. Drew looks like he could be pushing a stroller, though. Oh, for sure. I'm going to take that as a compliment. Yeah, Jess. Are we allowed to ask you how old you are by law? I don't think legally, no. Okay, yeah. I'm not asking you, but if you volunteer it, I'm just curious. But I'm 35.

I already had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by that point. So I would say, yeah, he's stroller age. Yeah. Final comment on your YouTube. Why do I just now realized Mike looks a lot like Matt Damon? Do you get the Matt Damon comparison? Yeah. Matt Damon crossed between Matt Damon and Bill O'Reilly. Oh.

Oh, wow. That's it. I would adjust that to just Bill O'Reilly. Now, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Wow, you are young, kind Bill O'Reilly. Every time, so over the years, I get Paul Rudd. The one I got for years was James Van Der Beek. Yeah, a little bit. I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers once, and James Van Der Beek was there. And I was like, hey, people,

people tell me I look like you. And he was just like, I don't see it. Anyway, and it was the, now I never say what people compare me. Well, the next time you're on O'Reilly, you should bring it up. Oh God. Yes. Where is O'Reilly now? Is it just, is it a podcast or is it a video? I don't know. He's, he's not on a network anymore. It's probably some kind of a self-release thing. Yeah. Yeah. From his bunker. Yeah. Yeah.

It's wild. Mike, talk to us about this special. So I saw versions of this along the way. So I saw you had Mike Birbiglia and friends where he did some of the material in this. And then I saw the full thing on stage and I saw it last night in its finished Netflix form. I think we've talked on previous episodes about your process, which we can see as like a bunch of note cards up on a board. Sure. What was the inception of this and when did you find the pieces fitting together? So the inception of it was

Two years ago, when I finished The Old Man in the Pool, which was at Lincoln Center, and we filmed it for Netflix, I always talk on my podcast about this concept of obsession. Like, what is the thing you're obsessed about, but can't stop thinking about? And it's like, as a writer, it's like, well, just write that. Just free write on that. I mean, this is my journal. It's like, I'm free writing on that at breakfast this morning. And two years ago, it was just kind of like,

Oh, this is weird. My daughter is eight years old now and I don't know a lot of the answers to the questions because kids just always ask so many questions. And I was knocking it out of the park till age eight. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, these are tricky questions. So I was like, I just went. My first thing is always like I go to the comedy cellar. I go to like small 100, 200 seat comedy rooms, try out a ton of jokes. Those jokes eventually become stories.

At a certain point, I start to form the stories into having, similar to how you guys talk about all the time of so then causality versus and then lateral movement story-wise. And about a year into the process, my dad had a stroke and so much of my life became about taking care of my dad. And so I started to think in relation to, okay, what if the show was about how do I explain things to my daughter and also...

What is my relationship with my own dad? And so it becomes this kind of, you know, the title is The Good Life, but it becomes a meditation on the question that my daughter asked me when she looked up at a smoke shop called The Good Life. Dad, what's The Good Life? And so it kind of opens this special with like an existential question. What is The Good Life? And it makes the audience wonder that. And then I go through a lot of stories with my daughter and with my dad, and then it arrives at a thesis at the end of what is The Good Life. Yeah.

Great. So when you're figuring out these pieces, one of these things you get to do as a stand-up comic is just constantly test the material and constantly see what actually resonates with the audience. So when we're writing scenes, we're writing scenes, but they just exist on a page and we don't hear them, we don't feel them, we don't get a reaction. You're constantly getting a reaction. And so what was the culling process like of like, oh, I think it's this idea and how developed are jokes you're telling in those initial rooms? The jokes at the beginning are...

They're developed insofar as I've run them by friends who are comics usually. Our listenerships are similar in the sense of it's a lot of creative people who are either working as creatives or want to work as creatives. And I always say like, try to build a community of the people around you. Like I look around at the people who I started with and we were all kind of broke and struggling in our 20s. And I love...

I look around and go, oh, they're doing really well now. You know what I mean? Like it's, there is a kind of thing to creating your own community of people who are at your level. And so I feel like now it's like, you know, people like,

Pete Holmes and John Mulaney are people who in my 20s were trying to figure it all out. And we would run jokes by each other. And now everyone has a really good career, but still... You run jokes by each other. Run jokes by each other. And then even like, you know, I think it was like one of those Largo shows that you were at and Mulaney came on.

And he gave me a joke that ended up in the special. He goes, there's a line where I go, I'm a comedian, my wife is a poet, together we're a sculptor. And I came off stage and he goes, what about this? He goes, it doesn't make sense, but what do you think of this? And I was like, yeah, I'll try that. And it somehow does make sense in the context of the special. And so that's what it is. It's like you start out with, you bounce jokes off friends, which is what my whole podcast is. And then when you figure out something that you think is worth an audience seeing, you put it out there.

And then I go on tour and that's really instructive, like bringing it to like all different cities because you see like, oh yeah, this isn't just like a provincial sense of humor in New York City. Like this is something that plays everywhere or it doesn't play. I mean, I think that, I think a huge part of being a comedian is figuring out like what doesn't work.

Yeah, I wish that we had that. Although I suppose what we do, because we don't quite have it on the granular level that you do, because I don't think any of our friends would just go, hey, here's a scene. Yeah, sure. It starts on page 37. You don't know what happened before. But we do, we will share scripts and we will look at, and maybe even it's more common to happen deeper into the process where we'll say, okay, here's a cut of. You know, you actually, you had that kind of testing procedure before.

for your movie. For Don't Think Twice. Don't Think Twice, where you would like have a reading and people would there and then, you know, discuss it, which was really smart. But it's hard to iterate. Long form writing is just hard to iterate overall. It is. It's, you know, you can't sort of like watch this whole thing. When I was doing Big Fish the musical, we could iterate. And so every night we could sort of see the show like, oh, this is what's working, this is what's not working. I could swap out jokes. Yes. We could move whole scenes around. But in

film and TV writing. It's not really possible. Yeah, it is a little scary to know that you're kind of chiseling in stone and then sending it out into the world. But what I love about what you're saying, it's what, you know, we talked about writers groups last week, I think. And part of me gets itchy when people write in. They're like, I'm part of a writers group. Because I think, well, what if all the writers in that group aren't very good? Because the odds are they're not. And then they're all giving each other advice and it's maybe bad. But then I think, okay, if you do find yourself

hitting a mark, getting a job, entering. Yeah. To look around for people that are also like you. And what I think has changed, I don't know if you agree with me, John, when we started in Hollywood, it felt like you were isolated and that in fact, we were all meant to be in competition with each other. So we were like horses in our stall, you know, before the gate opens. And I think as the internet kind of brought everybody together, that went away completely. Yeah.

And became more like, okay, I'm going to pick up the phone. Have you worked with this person? Or I have an idea. Do you think this is a good idea? And I love that you can do that with, does it ever hurt? Which part of it? When you're like, okay, I'm going to try this joke. Hey, you know, Mulaney, I'm going to run this by you. And he just stares at you and he's like, no, no.

No, I don't think that hurts. And I don't say, well, I mean, look, I think not doing well with a joke with friends is, it's hard. I mean, it's hard in that moment. Not doing well with a joke on stage is hard in that moment. But I think you have to, like there's an imperative to view it as I'm getting feedback for something that will be finished later. It's like the wisest thing that,

almost anyone ever taught me is my editor, Jeffrey Richman, who edited this special, he edited both of my movies, and he does Severance, he edited Severance, he did Escape the Den of Moria, he does a lot of stuff with Ben Siller. And on both movies, I had moments in the edit where I go, what are we going to do? This is a disaster. Oh, sure. And he just goes, oh, we're not going to hand it in until it's done. And it's so simple of an idea, but I think that that's

all artistic process. You just don't hand it in until it's done. Well, what I think people that work in comedy have, that people who have never worked in comedy don't have, is this, which is, sometimes I describe it as a work ethic, but what I really think it is is humility.

Comedy humiliates you. Yes, sure. Humiliates you. And then as part of the process, you must get re-humiliated over and over and over. That's right. To the point where you don't even see it as humiliation anymore. You see it as part of the process towards turning it in before it's done. That's right. And a lot of people who come in drama have this opposite point of view. Their point of view is,

I need to treasure my instincts and that is my voice. And what I have done, therefore, is correct, regardless of what people think. And I think having a little bit of that isn't such a bad idea, but...

I'm far more admiring of the humiliation sequence. Liz Gilbert has this, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love and many other great things, has this TED talk that's so good about the idea of not being a genius, but having a genius and holding it and kind of fostering it. And that way it doesn't become about you or you or you. Oh, yeah. And I think that that's,

really key as a comedian you can never think I am funny right you have to think I want to create something that is funny for these people that's brilliant I think that's absolutely brilliant now also you probably need to then do the same thing for whatever the opposite of genius is the self-loathing the the critic I guess which is sometimes hard for me like I should imagine like okay it's easy for me to imagine there's genius over there that's not me

Now I have to figure out like, okay. And also there's a critic over there, not in here. Yes. That can be difficult. I like that. I want to talk to you about how you bring yourself to your work because as writers, we're always putting ourselves in our scripts and our pages, but it's all disguised. It's never really exactly us. We're never identifying like, oh, this is me doing this thing versus your standup, which is all about what has happened to you. And all of your comedy is very, very,

centered on your experience with things that happened to you and the people around you, which is a challenge because, you know, your wife, Jenna, your daughter, Una, they've been part of all of your specials. We know a lot about them, even though we've never met them. My parents. Your parents, especially in this one. And your dad, who's kind of unwillingly dragged into this story. So you've been talking to him about it? Oh, yeah. And so can you talk to me as you're developing this material and trying it on stage, how

how do you find the boundaries of like, well, this is me, Mike Barbilla, as an individual person versus me, the performer who is creating this funny thing that's not me? That is probably the most challenging part of it. I think that's part of the reason why

I'm going to take a few years off from autobiographical storytelling right now because my daughter is 10 and she's entering those years where I feel like you don't want to make someone more self-conscious about all their stuff. Yeah. And you probably don't want to be looking too closely at it either. No. Having gone through it twice. Yeah. Because it is, it will be a great story for you

15 years. Sure. Yeah. That's what my wife is a poet, brilliant poet, but she always says whenever we're going through something that's really hard, she's like, write it down. Just don't release it now. Have you ever checked to see, because I like how concise that is, have you ever checked to see if she's constantly speaking to you in haiku and you just don't remember? It's been a long con this entire time and like, we're going to wind back the tape and I was like, oh, everything was a haiku. Because that would be the most brilliant thing

thing ever yeah she's no she really is uh she's very wise and poetic person but yeah that is hard that um and so i'm pivoting over to the thing i'm writing right now it's fictional i'm writing a movie to hopefully shoot next year in the vein of don't think twice is a small budget indie comedy and yeah i'm gonna take a few years off from it because i do think it's hard i mean it is

I'm talking about my dad. My dad's in his final stage of life. He could go tomorrow. He could go in a year or two years, but it's the final stage of life. It's so hard.

And yeah, that side of it, I'm always juggling, you know, what am I saying and am I depicting the person well? And am I trying to find myself as the joke of the story as opposed to just taking on people? Absolutely. In this last special, you're talking about how terrible nine-year-old girls are, which is just true. Nine-year-olds are terrible. And there's a reason why you sort of...

You go to the jumpy gym where everyone's going to get hurt because they're going to get hurt. And all that stuff is very relatable, but none of it is directed. Your daughter comes out well in all of it. I love my daughter. I hate her friends. Because a class of people is great, but the focus of the humiliation is always you. It's your hard nipples. That's right. I get that too. Well, you know what's funny about that? About the autobiographical side of that is the hard nipple story is basically a

I'll paraphrase it for the audience, but it's when I was 12, I had hard nipples. Sometimes something happens during puberty. I was always a hypochondriac, so I thought it was cancer. I went to my dad as a doctor. I go, hey, dad, I have hard nipples. And

And on your shadow, you say, Dad, I have cancer. I can't. Right, right, right. I have cancer. He goes, why do you think that? I have hard nipples. I loved how calm he was. Why do you think that? Exactly. Well, he's a neurologist. Yeah, yeah. No emotion. Yeah. And so I was like, well, see for yourself. I take off my shirt and in the living room, he feels my hard, hard nipples.

And then he gives me the briefest medical diagnosis I've received to this very day. He goes, nope. And that was the end of the conversation. What a comforting presence in your life. Yeah, exactly. This is a great example of like when people ask me, are these stories true? Sometimes they're not true in small ways that you would never guess. When my dad felt my nipples, it was in his bedroom.

I took it out. Yeah, that's smart. I relocated it to the living room because the audience... You don't want them going where you don't want them going. You want them going there a tiny bit, which is LOL, my dad's feeling me up. LOL, yes. But if he's feeling me up in his bedroom, that's not LOL. Right. Well, what's also crucial though is that you had already set up that your dad would come home from his...

two jobs and sit in his chair and read his war novels. And so you're able to sort of call it back to war novels. And so he sets down his war novel and puts his hands on your hard nipples. That's right. And so you already created the image for us, which is why it's so much better to set where it is. War novels.

So apparently we have the same dad. Yes, exactly. I love dadness. I have to say, like, it's underappreciated in our society. We make fun of the fact that the dad who comes home sits there and reads the war novel or watches the History Channel or plays a very long version of some World War II simulation with a friend.

It's wonderful. Like, let's celebrate that. Yeah, sure. Let's celebrate that guy. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk to you about before we get to these, how it's been jokes, is transitions. Because we talk on the show constantly about transitions and how you move from scene to scene. Watching, so I'd seen your special on stage, but watching it filmed, it's like,

I was very aware. I was like, when you're transitioning from one idea to the next idea, from one tone to the next tone, from like, we're in this world now, we're in this world. And I'm sure it's a thing that you worked out doing the show again and again live, but you were able to pivot on such small spaces. And sometimes it's a gesture, it's a single word repeated and pull us along to a completely new thing. Are you writing that? Are you singing that? Or is it just how it works on stage as you're filling it out? I

I would describe that as the final stage of the development in like a two-year process. It's probably like the final six months is figuring out how is this story, so then this story, so then this story, so then this story. So my director, Seth Barish, who also directed the special and

It's a confusing title for people, but he's a dramaturgical person. He works through the script with me and the logic of the script. And so Will spent an extraordinary amount of time

he'll go, you know, when you go to the hard nipples story and then you go to, but actually your, you know, your dad wasn't physically affectionate, but you are physically affectionate with your daughter. You hug her. You say, I love you. I don't understand the connection between those two ideas. And,

And it's almost like he's making what Seth is doing is he's making his brain blank and are attempting to over and over and over again, trying to imagine what it would be like as someone who's never seen the show. Getting rid of the curse of knowledge. Yeah. The curse of knowledge. And so we have these long drawn out conversations. And I'm sure you guys deal with this in television and films all the time, which is like,

you'll end up taking something that was 150 words. And then at the end of the edit, it's four words. But those four words are the right four words. Absolutely. That's a lot of what we do. Last night, we were also talking about how

A thing you do really, really well, which you see other comics do, but I was really struck by last night, is we're on one thread and then you take a diversion and we're on another thread, which is really, really funny. And then you pull us back to the main thread and we'd forgotten that we were on that thread. And yet we're like, oh, yeah, you get a jolt of energy because you're back on the main thread. You kind of forgot that you'd taken a detour. It's not a recall. It's a recall.

We're just rejoining the story that we were already on. It's really well done. Well, you get to be a genius because if you're talking normally with people, you cannot maintain 12 spinning plates, including a hidden one up your sleeve that you then go, ah, ah, ah. But you plan your own drill.

I mean, so that when you do come back around to things, it's magician stuff, right? Well, it's a very strange art form in the sense that as a comedian, when you meet people, you are always a letdown. Because you look like that guy on stage. And then suddenly... And your voice is the same as that guy on stage. But there's less jokes. There's less causality story to story, right?

The transitions aren't great. No big surprises. No big surprises. No full circles. No natural segues. Just a lot of stammering and sweat.

Also, what I've noticed through the years is I think comedians are people who are frustrated at parties because when we perform, people laugh or don't laugh. They don't interject. They don't go, let me tell you about my sleepwalking story. No, no, sir, sit down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heckler. This is the best one. Yeah. I've got the best sleepwalking story here. Everyone shut up. You do. Yeah. You should just bring somebody with you to parties.

Who can tell other people to shut up. Can you imagine if comedians showed up at parties and were like, all right, everyone step aside. Yeah. Yeah, all of your stupid stories. With your banter. We've got a good one. That's like crowd tested. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that must be really frustrating. That's like being, I don't know, you play in the symphony and then you go to somebody's backyard where everyone's like, oh, we're going to do a quick jam. What do you play? Violin? Yeah, yeah.

But the guy banging the pot lid is really loud. You guys must have that though with movies because people, everyone has a take on movies and television. And then you come in and you're like, okay, here's my take and mine's right. Yeah, but also the movie is not happening in front of you. No one's expecting like, Craig, make a movie right now. Like there's not that performance. If it were a party where the idea was to write a short scene. Yeah. And I suppose that would be.

Really frustrating. I suppose like beautiful people who are photographed, like they're still beautiful in real life, but they're not as attractive. They look immortal. The wind machine is on and so forth. Yeah.

Yeah, but you're absolutely right. You guys are kind of in the worst spot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Let's take a look at writing some jokes. And so we have three different stories that I pulled from recent news things. We're going to start with the Run Club Haters. This is a story in Curbed Magazine, a New York magazine by Melissa Dahl. Drew, can you give us a short summary of the lead here for this story?

One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day. The sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone like her and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight towards her.

"'I've never seen anything like it,' says Amy, who's 31 and has been running in New York since 2015. It was, in her memory, a group of young women running five to eight abreast. They were completely across the sidewalk, she recalls. This is the most runners she's ever seen taking up a path, but she's gone head-to-head with run clubs before. Usually, she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane. But this time, she wanted to test something. She didn't change course, and neither did they."

It was something of a game of runner's chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook, Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn't stick around, too.

And so this article goes on to talk with organizers of run clubs, including some who sort of accidentally started a run club because they just posted on Instagram, like, I'm going for a run. If anyone wants to join, like, then 100 people show up. They're also talking about parks that are now requiring permits, costing $1,000 for people to do this. Wow. So this is as a story space. And I was wondering, like, let's first start talking about, like, where are the jokes? Where's the comedy we could find in this if we were...

If we were Amy. If we were Amy. I want to be Amy. I don't want to be in the run club. So we could be any of the characters in the story, but if this is something that happened to us or around us, where are some of the jokes? Where are the comedic premises? I think, first of all, you'd have to be Amy in the story, right? You'd have to... If you're one of the big group bird people who've...

Essentially like wallop someone in the street. Like that's not going to be very relatable. But we've all been the Amy of the story. Yeah. Which is like, I would say if this were my story, if this were something that happened to me, it would be talking about the observation in general of when people take up the whole sidewalk. You can bring up different examples. One of my examples that drives me nuts is...

People with dogs where they're on one side of the sidewalk. The leash goes across. It's essentially a tripwire created by them and their evil dog. And they don't act like they're taking up the whole curb. But I would go into like observational things about that. And then I would go into how do you feel about walking? How do you, are you afraid of walking? How do you feel about walking in the city? Like Ira Glass in some ways taught me how to tell these types of things

seven to 10 minute stories. And he always thinks of it in terms of a story non comedically is a little bit of plot. How do you feel about the plot? A little bit more plot. How do you feel about the plot? And in my case, as a comedian, it's a little bit of plot, some jokes about the plot, a little bit of plot, the jokes about the plot. So in order for us to care about Amy's story, or quote unquote, my story, walking down the street and running into a herd of runners,

is you have to know that that pushes my buttons as a character. Right. Right? Not enough to know that anybody would feel particularly annoyed. You really feel. That's right. Like if this were in a very broad movie, there's the classic escalation technique. So it begins with I'm running and there's one guy just stacking. I got to go around.

All right, and then there's the guy with the dog, and then there's two runners, and then there's just a wall of runners, and then there's a Zamboni. Yes, that's right. So you just keep, it just gets stupider and stupider. That's straight from Naked Gun. That's Naked Gun. But I do think there could be a sketch version where you are part of the run club. Oh, the runners group? Yeah. Where the run club is the most heinous, horrible group of people, and it's not just runners, it's people in stretchers, and it's, you know.

I could see that. Yeah. It's taking me back to like on Safari and you'll see like a bunch of animals stampede and it's like, oh shit, like one runner by themselves is not threatening at all. But you see a pack moving towards you. They just, all your instincts kick in. It's like, oh, this is a dangerous situation. Yes. I also want to get back to sort of what you talk about, like humiliation and sort of Amy being the source, being humiliated or being the source of like the problem.

the problem is her is also I think really important too. Like, what is it about me that I decided like today I'm going to be the person I'm not, I'm not going to move. Well, today I decided is really good. Yeah. Because yeah, yeah. Maybe the setup is like every day I see the wrong person I turn around and flee. And today I'm not going to because a friend told me to stick up for myself and my therapist and I'm going to hold my head high and I'm not going to move. And she's

killed. They kill her, which is a really good lesson. I have an analogous story years ago that I do as stand-up sometimes has never found his way into a special, but it's a similar city scenario, which is years ago, I'm rushing down subway steps at the West Forest stop, and

One of the jokes I make is, I'm always in a rush. I have nowhere to be. I've never had anywhere to be. I'm always in a rush. And I trip on my lace. My dad taught me how to tie my shoes when I was a kid. He was never around. And so...

I'm not good at it. And so I trip fourth step from the bottom, fly in the air. I land on the ball of my shoulder. I know. I know. I often get people groaning. I know. And I was that guy. Right. Writhing on the floor. Dirty subway floor. Dirty subway floor.

people blowing past me just like, are you okay? No. Good. You know, or yeah, good. And then they're gone. And then what I sometimes say, that would be like, Oh, if you're, if, if you're laughing, you've been one of these pigs and I want you to know we're not fooled by your faux generosity. It is a similar scenario where essentially what you're trying to explain is that

what your point of view is, what your status quo is. It's not dissimilar to movie writing. And then what happens? And then what happens because of that? Yeah. Because of that, there's a chain of events. There's a causality. Like this was not the end of the story. This is moving to the next thing. Let's try our next thing. This is a story from Slate's Care and Feeding. The advice is from Michelle Herman, but the letter writer is anonymous. Drew, help us out.

My mother and father divorced more than 10 years ago when I was in eighth grade after my mother learned my dad was cheating on her. Once my parents split, my father married his affair partner, Ruth, and moved out of state. They ended up having two kids who are now eight and five. And after my dad moved out of the house, he never paid a penny in child support, and I didn't hear a word from him again. Until now.

My dad told me that my five-year-old half-sister, Amelia, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Her medical team wanted her to undergo a bone marrow transplant, but neither he, his wife, nor my half-brother was a match. He asked if I would be willing to undergo a screening to see if I am. Long story short, I am. I find myself utterly conflicted.

This man, who was supposed to be my dad, to love and provide for me, shattered my family with his selfishness. He abandoned me for the woman he cheated on my mother with. He wasn't there to teach me to drive or to see me graduate from high school or college. While I spent a decade dealing with the pain and rage his walking out on me caused, he started a new family and forgot I existed. Had his daughter not needed a donor, I doubt I would have ever heard from him again. But here he is, crawling to me, hat in hand,

That's the stupid part? Like, okay, so because this guy cheated on my mom and left and didn't pay child support...

I now have a golden opportunity to murder a little girl. Oh my God. I mean, it was pretty awesome actually. I also like that she said a fair partner by the way. There's a whole side bit on that. Like,

Partner. The way that partners become a thing, like in our society, it was just like husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend. And now everyone says partner. I never know if people are gay or not. I have no idea what's going on. I don't know if they're working together or romantic. It's a startup. A fair partner. It's an app they're working on. Yeah, exactly. And a fair partner is incredible. That's like granting status, like cheating part. Anyway. Yeah.

So there's lots of things to unpack and like potential comedic things to hold on to, even though this is not obviously comedic, but there's some good stuff here. So her rage to this disappearing dad, like that conflict and that's sort of like my expectation of what this man is versus the reality is great comedic fodder. Obviously her relationship to whatever this donor, her half-sister is, is fascinating. The space of...

bone marrow donations and sort of like, you know, would you help out a stranger? The trolley problem of it all is also fascinating. So, Mike, what's your weigh-in? Yeah, I mean, I think the weigh-in with anything that dramatic, I always say to people, like,

you need to find one joke that works. Because the one joke that works indicates to the audience, we're all okay laughing about this. Because the way that Drew read it, and it was beautiful, was a little bit like a eulogy, where it's a sad story. I mean, that's a tough story.

So if you just told it like Drew told it on stage in the first person, people would know to laugh. They would go, well, what's the funny part? I just think you need to find a joke. So it's like I have a joke in my special where I go, my dad was a doctor and his free time he got his law degree. That's how much he didn't want to be a dad. The audience knows that my point of view is I'm over that part of it. I'm okay with that part of it. I had bladder cancer when I was 20 and the first joke I figured out was like,

I had bladder cancer, but it's funny because I'm a hypochondriac. I think the funniest thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is you get cancer because it affirms every fear you've ever had. See, I told you. Remember last week when I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There's got to be a lot of changes around here. When I showed you my nipples. Exactly, yeah. If someone wanted to do a comedy bit of this, it's like, well, where is the first joke that indicates that this is...

okay and that joke has to be really good probably nothing I could come up with now but it's like you know my dad wasn't around as a kid and then he called me because he wanted my bones but just something where just like you break open how outrageous the scenario is and then it turns on itself because I think you can do like my dad wasn't around then he wanted my bones and then try to come up with a joke run on that and then say

But actually, I'm tolerant on it because this girl deserves this and she needs this and I could help. And I think like with a story that inherently has such high stakes, you have the ability to both have jokes and have dramatic moments. In The Good Life, you see there's like four or five times where it goes to a dramatic moment just because –

The audience, a lot of it is the audience doesn't see it coming at a comedy show. It's like, in some ways, it's the ultimate surprise. I think the back and forth of jokes in comedy, I think jokes and dramas, it is the potential there. You could also, I could see occupying a kind of character and the character is...

a woe is me character. I was like, anyway, my dad left and cheated on my mom and then married this other lady and they had a great family. It was incredible. He never talked to me ever on

until his daughter was sick and he came from my bone marrow. And I thought, he loves me. That's good. I mean, so it depends like occupying, because I do enjoy comedians who occupy characters. I love that. I love the kind of that weird space, you know. And it's always interesting meeting them afterwards and going like Natasha Leggero occupies a character. And then you talk to Natasha offstage and you're like,

You are the opposite of that person. Right. And then you could heighten that and be like, then he asked me to borrow $75,000. And I was like, maybe this isn't love. Wait a second. So as the marrow is leaving me, I thought, wait, wait. Let's talk about this as a scene. So

obviously it could be a movie which is the whole dynamic but you could also imagine like a scene where you're talking to this girl at a party and she gets to the point where it's like so now I don't even know if I should donate marrow to this kid it's like what are you talking about you were going to kill a small child it's a good build up for like what kind of monster are you so obviously you all know where this went

I didn't do it. Right. Exactly. So she's been dead like, I don't know, three or four years now. Oh my God. And I got to tell you, it feels great. Like they tell you it won't, but it does. Revenge is awesome. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. A lot of that is, you know, those are like,

Three different POV takes on the same... With different tones. Yeah, a lot of it's persona. So Anthony Jezelnik gets away with a different type of joke than I get away with. I wish we could send him that. Yeah. Oh my God, Anthony Jezelnik. Can we just... But again, occupying a character's body. Yeah, completely. But I just want to like salute... Oh, I assume that. He's not actually like that, is he? Oh God, I hope not. Not that I know of. Yeah, no, that would be insane. I've never had an interaction with him like that. But the mathematical precision...

Oh, yeah. He's the closest thing that comedy has to Agatha Christie. You know there's going to be a twist and you're trying to figure it out. Yeah, that's right. And you can't. And it just happens over and over and over and over. That's right. He's just, the craft there is pretty remarkable. Great. So this last one, we don't have that part to read, but this is a New York Times article by Heather Knight and Lauren Elliott with great photos and video by Elliott.

It's about the coyotes of San Francisco. And basically, there were no coyotes in San Francisco, but 10 years or so ago, they started coming back in. And now there are more than 100 coyotes in San Francisco. And they're letting them be largely. And so...

One case, like they were going after a young child and they went after that coyote. But basically, they do keep down rodent populations and other things. So there's a reason to be there. But it's just so jarring to have coyotes in the city that never had them before. And coyotes are cool. So obviously in Los Angeles, we're used to coyotes in our neighborhood. We have coyotes all the time. But the comedic space of like,

predators in an urban environment and sort of like how a person interacts with them, sort of what the moment is. This is in San Francisco. In San Francisco. Yeah. Hacks this last season has a coyote episode where Jean Smart's character is hearing the coyotes howl all the time. She's putting out bear urine to scare them away. She has a showdown with a coyote at the end. But let's talk about sort of what can we imagine the comedic premises are for talking about coyotes on stage? What are the handles for that?

For me, it would have to be story-based interacting with a coyote, right? Like, I'm trying to think if I have, do you guys have any good animal stories of interacting with animals? I mean, my mind goes to just right off the bat,

But what is a, isn't a coyote just an asshole dog? Yeah. Like why have we put it in this special category? It's just, I've looked at them. They're hungry dogs. That's all they are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sense of like, you know, well, it's a dog off leash though. And so like, we have a sense of like, you know, oh, dogs are wonderful. But like when you see a dog in a place, you don't expect to see a dog or a dog who doesn't seem to have an owner. That's. You call it a coyote. Yeah. Right. Right.

They're like the hobos of dogs. I was just in Egypt and Egypt is just like, there's dogs everywhere. There's street dogs. And I was like, oh wait, why don't dogs get hit? And Mike pointed out like, oh, we're seeing that's the logic fallacy. Like basically we're seeing the dogs that survived. Yeah. You see the dogs that aren't hit. Yeah. Yeah. Coyotes in San Francisco probably, like I think the hacky version would just be to start making fun of San Francisco. And it's like, oh, now the coyotes, you know, keep moving into our neighborhood and the rents are going up. Right. Yeah.

Coyotes don't seem funny to me. I feel like I would break it. Come on, Wile E. Coyote is an incredible character. The thing is, Wile E. Coyote is, we're laughing at him, I suppose, but he's not doing anything irregular. I've never seen a coyote use an acne product. If I were going to go into animals, which if I ever did, it would be the inherent contradiction. So much of comedy is about inherent contradiction. The contradiction is similar to what you're saying. It's like,

We eat animals. We own animals. We shoo away animals. How are we decided? Yeah. Yeah. Who made up the rules on this? I think Gaffigan's got a pretty good one of like, we eat the animals that aren't cute. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But I think like the contradictions would be the thing that would go down. And also the personal story. I always tell you, you know, like one of the probably the smartest things I did was

it was like 25 years ago, I had been doing set up punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline based on things in the news, things happening around town. And then at a certain point, I was like, well, if I wrote about my own experiences, then no one can steal that idea. And really, no one has that idea. No one's lived that. So the first thing this makes me think of is like,

there's animals in the walls of my apartment that just like run over us and sometimes Jen will just be like Mo she calls me Mo Mo like

what are we going to do about the animals? And I'm like, I don't think you know who you married. I don't even know. I have no plan for the animals in the ceiling. Yeah. Like, and I'm not gonna have one. You know what I mean? Right. And you know that about me. Yeah. So, I don't know. I do think like finding the what's your story. The thing about

stand-up comedy in relation to storytelling is that the more you have examples of things of your experience of dealing with something, the more people can see themselves in the story. And they're not judging it as, oh, this is another guy or lady with a hard take on coyotes or this or that or whatever. And so I always just try and think, what's the personal way in? What's the personal way in? Because ultimately...

you actually, by telling stories, are,

are exhibiting a point of view. But because it's in the form of a story, the audience isn't as suspicious of the point of view. Well, and also, to give you credit, it's not a persona. This is actually you. You're incredibly likable. And you're incredibly likable in no small part because you're not afraid to be vulnerable. Like, a lot of comedians, their persona is, I figured it all out. Right. I figured it all out. Let me explain the world to you. Yes. Idiots, right? And...

Your persona and your personalities, I haven't. I'm on a journey. I often don't know what to do. I'm scared a lot. I'm confused. And everyone's like, okay, I'm with you now on this. It's so funny you should say that because the other day I did an interview for Time Magazine and she goes, the reporter was great. She goes, um,

It's a funny question. She goes, what's your appeal? I love that. That's so good. And I've never been asked that. What's your appeal? And it forced me to look inward. She goes, the appeal of Jim Gaffigan is that he's clean and he's relatable. And the appeal of this person is that she can go through it.

I go, huh. And it's so funny what I see. It's amazing. What reminded me of it is that my answer is similar to Craig's. There you go. I think if I really had to think about it, I think people –

think they're on the journey with me because I'm cataloging these eras of my life as honestly as I can. And the audience, I think, trusts that I'm trying my best. And I think the people who like me are trying their best. And it's weird to say that that's my quote unquote appeal, but I think it is probably close to that. When she asked the question, there's two different meanings to that question.

One is, I'm curious, what do you think your appeal is? And the other one is, what is your appeal? Well, there's two different leads. I'm so confused why anyone likes you. Can you explain why people like you? It was generous, though. I think she's a good writer. We'll see how the article comes out. It's reminding me of when we were doing Big Fish on Broadway, after the Wednesday matinees, sometimes we would do talkbacks where people could stay in the audience and talk back. It's always really old people who stick around who go to Wednesday matinees in the first place.

And so it's me and several of the actors at the front of the stage talking to people who stuck around. And this one old woman, she asked me a question. She's like, why are you so confident?

Oh my gosh. Why are you so confident? Yeah. Wow. And it's just, it was, it was actually just. What a confident shaking question. Yeah. It sort of put me on my heels. Like, I guess I, I guess I am, I had to sort of do an introspection. Like, I guess I am confident, but why am I confident? Like, who is this person who is speaking right now who is confident doing this thing? Yeah. It was, it was, it was a while. It really did shake me a bit. It,

Yes, of course. It's a rattling question. Why are you so confident? It's suspicious. Yeah, it's a challenge to it. But I think to go back to this kind of point of view and comedy concept, it's like, why is Jezelnik Jezelnik and me, me, and Gaffigan Gaffigan? A majority of what you do if you're trying to be a comedian is...

You try to figure out who you are on stage in relation to the audience. What's your appeal? Yeah, it's what's your appeal. But it's like, oh, and it takes years. And sometimes it takes a decade or more. It is interesting seeing comedians...

early in their careers as opposed to where they end up. And sometimes it's sort of unrecognizable. Absolutely. And it is a fascinating thing to watch them evolve into the groove. And sometimes I think like, oh, do people get trapped, you know?

because they get very successful and then suddenly that fake accent and get her done thing that you're doing, you can't stop doing it. Are you speaking of someone specifically? No. Just in general? Just in general, like, yeah. So hypothetically, if someone was like, said a joke and they're like, get her down.

That would be like a thing that you're leaning on a crutch. If they were like at a job that isn't really a job anymore, like a cable guy. Right, or a plumber or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Like what do you do then? Because you're stuck making all that. What if you never were a cable guy? Or had that accent. So good. Then what do you do? A crisis of inauthenticity. This is like a three-page challenge of personas. Uh-huh.

What if I had a heel turn where actually just like it goes off for a little while and it comes back as like this shock comic. I would love to see it. Well, it's funny. Dickery, dickery, duck. Yeah, yeah. No, I do. I do think that there is a version of the next few years where I'm leaning a little bit away from personal stuff where I do something that. Sure.

takes on the religion, politics, world events, but in an evergreen way. I think what drives me crazy about topical comedy is that you just go, okay, well, this isn't relevant today even. It was relevant 24 hours ago, but I would like to see something that has a wide spanning, like the last 20 years of living in America. Sounds like something that O'Reilly would do. Yes.

Cross, did you and Matt Damon and Bill O'Reilly would do? As we wrap up our discussion of coyotes, I do want to share one photo, which I think is a great comedic premise. So this little white dog is wearing what's called a coyote coat. And it's basically, it looks like a life jacket, but it has all these little plastic spikes on it so that a coyote can't bite it and carry it off into the woods. And so I can just imagine sort of like having to buy the coyote coat for my dog or just like,

My dog having to wear that coyote coat, it's like you're in a war zone now. I think that is, some people might think that that disrupts the Darwinian process. But I think that it is an example of the Darwinian process. You become so cute that a larger, stronger animal dresses you in special things so that you aren't devoured. It's a strategy. It's a strategy. That's a strategy. Yeah. Let's tackle some listener questions. We have one here from Chris.

Let's say I heard an idea for a short film expressed on a podcast by a working actor, writer, comedian, and wanted to make that film, but was not able to make contact with said person to ask permission. Could that film still be made and shown publicly? Is there credit to be attributed or not?

What if there is a line spoken by an actor that is nearly identical to what was expressed in the podcast? In this case, this would be like 60-second film for social media, just for context. I can already hear Craig saying, you can't copyright an idea, but maybe the person or podcast details are important.

Yeah, I will say you can't copyright an idea, but that doesn't mean you should be doing this. It also feels like stealing a joke. It feels like... There's legal lines and there are moral lines. So, like, legally, could you get away with it? But always remember, legally getting away with it means you were sued, spent money to defend yourself, and won, which is not ideal. And in this case also, it's just, yeah, come up with your own idea. That's my feeling is...

If that person wanted to do a 60-second short bit about that, they would. It's a little odd. I don't think I would recommend that. The fact that you're doing this on a podcast with a working actor, writer, comedian, like, it's their thing. They may actually do a thing with. If you heard it in a conversation or, like, your brother said something, it's a different kind of thing. And you could also just ask their permission. I also think, yeah, kind of building on what you're both saying is,

As creatives, if you're pursuing a creative profession, it is so oversaturated. There are so many things being made simultaneously. I actually think the only chance any of us stand is to have our work be so much ours and not something that's already filmed, recorded and kind of out there in the universe. That sucks.

you're actually... It's a weird, like, case against the argument... The idea is that it's out there. Right. Even if it's not a short film already, someone said it, so it's a little bit less original than you'd want it to be. Well, going back to what we were just saying about hiking is just walking, that idea of what's out there is it's not an original idea, and so...

great. Do something else that is specifically to you. 100%. And by the way, to speak to that person's note, that's an oddly helpful kind of piece of feedback. Yeah. It's like, once that person says, hey, that's out there in blah, blah, blah way. Like sometimes people along the tour for two years, people will say to me, hey, this line you have is similar to this comics thing you have. And often I'll go and I'll

dig it up and try to find it. And then you have to make a judgment call. Is it too similar? If it is, can I write it in a different direction? Right. I had one a few specials ago where someone, when it came out as a special, was like, that's my joke. And I was like,

I don't know what to tell you. I never saw your joke and it's filmed right now. So I don't, it's parallel thinking and I feel bad that that's the case, but there's nothing I can do. It's definitely best efforts to not do that. Dylan in Little Rock has a question.

I'm feeling myself getting a little bit paralyzed. I'm feeling that I need to start writing in order to feel accomplished and hold on to some momentum, but I'm not feeling that I have really broken the story in a satisfactory way, and I don't feel that I know the characters as well as I could or maybe should. I've considered that the process of writing may help me to come up with new ideas and fill in some of the gaps, but when do you consider a story broken? How do you know when your characters are developed enough, and how much character development work do you do before you write? Yeah.

So breaking a story means different things in different contexts. And so in a TV writer's room, you break a story, you're figuring out all the beats on a big whiteboard and you're doing that stuff. The process of writing a feature film, it could be more experimental. You're sort of putting things together as you're doing them. I often won't have the full thing broken as I start. I'll just, I'll kind of feel it out along my way. There's probably not a perfect answer for this. You're writing something right now. Is what you're writing broken? Do you know what all the beats are? It's so funny. Whenever people say this term, breaking a story, I'm always like,

It's not my process. Mine is, I have an idea for a story. I write it out in the outline. At a certain point, I take it as script. At a certain point, this is where I am right now, I take it back to outline. Because I'm trying to isolate all the individual character arcs and I'm trying to isolate all the individual character arcs.

And I can't do it in a script form. Yeah. And that's where, yeah, that's literally what I am right now. Like my brain can't do it. How do you guys deal with that? Actually? That's a good, that's a question from me to you. How do you deal with managing? Like in the case of my movie, it's like there's eight characters. Yeah. It's akin to like a movie like four weddings and a funeral where not everybody has to have like a meaningful arc, but unless they have like a little miniature arc, I do feel like there's some threads that are on unfinished. I,

I think I probably wouldn't start writing until I understood all of that. All of it. Yeah, but that's me. And I think your process clearly works for you and is perfectly fine. Anyone's process is fine if the outcome is good. Yeah.

And I think breaking the story is actually, I agree with you, it's not a useful term. It comes really from writers' rooms. Yeah. From 14 writers eating Mendocino Farms and hashing out, okay, this episode, this happens, and what's the A story, what's the B story, what's the C story? It is procedurals, right? Like very, there is a mechanism to it, which is important for that process. But-

For a movie, I never use the phrase breaking the story for a movie. Really, I would say outline. Yeah. I write a really, I start with a very broad outline. Yeah. Who's the main character? What is the thing that needs to happen at the end? What would be an interesting beginning for that? What is the premise of this thing and what's the journey? I think one of the best things you can have in terms of breaking a story or to use that term is like,

figuring out can I pitch this in 25 words or 50 words and is that compelling if I told this to a friend and I said it in the first person are they interested yeah and I think that if they're not interested is when you start to go okay let me figure out where I'm losing their interest

Yeah, I just pitched a project yesterday, and in the early sort of conversations with people, it wasn't sort of fully broken. I sort of like knew kind of what the beats were, but by the time where I was actually pitching it to a buyer, it really had all the beats. You could feel what the entire movie was, and that's, I guess, what I would consider broken. It's like you really can have a sense of what all the sequences of the story were going to be. Yeah, and I think like it's funny, like you hear terms like breaking story or like industry terms, and like in so many ways, the work I enjoy most is,

is people trying to reinvent what their artistic process is. So like, if you look at Last of Us, for example, I think my favorite thing about it is it's not like other television shows. In some ways, weirdly, it doesn't resemble a TV show. It kind of feels like life. It feels like we are in this apocalyptic scenario and oh my God, what is that? And what would I do? And what's she going to do? Well, it's...

It's definitely not like other shows. Don't you think that's part of it is like making things that aren't, that don't feel like other things? Yes, I do think so. And I think that's become more and more important because there are 14 million television shows. The trick is to find a way to both be different and also compelling. It is very easy to be different and bad.

because a lot of difference were considered by our forebears and tossed aside because they were bad. But I would say to Dylan, you need to slow down a little bit and ask yourself if maybe the story that you've come up with, any of the things that you think of as fixed in position should be fixed in position. Sometimes we get stuck. We build...

a column and a load-bearing wall, and then we're like, I can't fit the rooms I want around this. Maybe the problem is the column and the load-bearing wall. Those things that we think of as immovable, maybe start moving them. I also think, like, you look at, like, things that we admire. I was saying, like, Last of Us, another one would be, like, the films of David Lynch. It's like, if you try to put Mulholland Drive into, like,

The story format of a key or something. It's like, I don't know what that is. Pitch that in 50 words. Yeah, I don't know. That would be the pitch. Yeah, exactly. That's the pitch. So what's it about? Yeah, I don't know. All right, let's do our one cool thing here. I'm going to call an audible, and so I'm going to pivot from what I was going to recommend to—

in terms of just like breaking the form and spinning a bunch of plates, John Mulaney's show, Everybody's Live, has just gotten really, really good. Oh yeah, it's great. And so if you've not watched it at all, go back and watch the episode. Guests are Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt. But the show is just nuts. And Mulaney's blindfolded through the whole episode. 19,000 things are happening and it all holds together really, really well. And it's postmodern in the sense like there's a theme kind of, but it's just great.

crazy and I just I'm really admiring what they're able to pull off once a week on a millennia show everybody's live on Netflix amazing what about you I was thinking of young comedians newer comedians there's this great comic named Chris Fleming who came on my podcast recently and he just kills me he's a Massachusetts guy like me and he he

Talk about like burning it all down. Like he just has no allegiances to anyone specifically in culture. And so like he'll say things around. I said to him on my podcast, like, do you know that guy? You know, the person who's everything? He's like, no. I go, you don't know that person. You said that crazy joke. Right. But he's great. That's awesome. He's super funny. And to speak to the kind of David Lynch with The Last of Us of it all, of like creating a thing that hasn't existed before it.

When I look at Chris Fleming, I don't go, oh, that's like this. Right. I just go, whoa, that's Chris Fleming. Yes. I love that. Yeah. Who is this? Who is this? That's my favorite. Yeah.

Well, I've been on a roll for One Cool Things for Games. Yes. So I spoke to Inevitable Foundation, which is run by Richie Siegel. And it was a lovely group of folks. And he was kind enough to send along some of the feedback, which was all bad. And they were very happy. And...

One person in their feedback said, oh, and by the way, since I know Craig likes these sort of things, he really needs to play Blueprints if he hasn't. So Blueprints is as in blue, the color, and then prints P-R-I-N-C-E. But of course, this is a pun on Blueprints. And the game is so simple and so hard, which I love. Oh, wow. You have inherited a mansion from your mysterious uncle.

And your job is to go through and explore the mansion, which has 45 rooms, find the 46th room, and you will be able to keep the mansion.

And the mechanics are every day you start in the foyer and there are three doors. And when you open a door, it gives you a choice to draft what room goes there. And there are like 40 types of rooms and you pick it and you start to move through. And every time the house is different and some rooms just stop and you know if they stop or not. And so there are costs and keys and methods and puzzles and

And it's roguelike because then the next day you're like, okay, that didn't work. Let me try this. And it's early on for me and I am so beautifully frustrated. I love it. Yeah. It's really, it's like when you come across a fresh idea like that, it's really cool. Yeah. So Blueprints and it's developed by Dogubomb. Great. And you can get it on PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, your Steam Deck, which is where I play it and so forth. Very nice.

That is our show for this week. Script Notes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Sam Shepson. It is edited by Matthew Schlelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you want an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnoss.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Don't leave comments on Spotify because we turned those off. But you can leave comments to our YouTube videos, which we now have a Script Notes YouTube channel. You do? Yeah, we just added this this week. Another place for people to yell at me about Joel.

I'm Script Notes Premium, by the way. Well, thank you very much for that. I joined recently. I love it. Oh, that's great. Y'all's back episodes. I love it. Two of my faves are Dennis Palumbo, of course, and the Craig Mazin, here's how to write a movie. So good. Those are both available on our YouTube. Yeah.

Yeah. We should probably charge extra for that. Yeah, yeah. How do we charge extra? Yeah. Supplements. Because we got to get these cool new microphones. You'll find transcripts at johnoffice.com along with the sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find us at Cotton Bureau. You get the show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. For Craig to dream of new microphone setups in our audience here. Yes.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. Get all those back episodes like episode 99 and how to write a movie. Go into segments like the one we're about to record on the infrastructure of being a stand-up comic and doing all the things that you have to do to actually make a living with that. Mike Verbiglia, thank you so much for being on the show. Such an honor. I love the show. My favorite podcast. Thank you.